The marches get the photographs. The work happens afterward, when the people who marched go home and try to change their own towns. In 1988 Urvashi Vaid helped start a place to learn how.
After the 1987 March
In October 1987 hundreds of thousands of people came to Washington for the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, where Vaid was then the public information director, had helped organize it. The next year the Task Force held the first Creating Change, a national conference built around skills: the practical work of organizing, taught by activists to activists.
Vaid co-founded it. Thirty-four years later, a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives for Pride Month put it plainly: "Urvashi Vaid cofounded the Creating Change Conference in 1988."
Growing
The conference moved around the country. The third, in Minneapolis, drew more than 700 people. In February 1991 the Task Force announced the fourth for November 9–12 in Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Washington, with more than 60 workshops. "Creating Change has evolved into a major political event," its conference coordinator, Brian Albert, said.
Vaid kept coming back. The photograph below is from the 1993 conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, the year after she left the Task Force's top job to write Virtual Equality (What "Virtual Equality" Means).
Today, in the words of the same House resolution, it is "the largest annual LGBTQIA+ conference convening in the United States," with more than 2,000 people a year.
A cabinet secretary on the stage
On Saturday, January 28, 2012, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan, spoke at the 24th Creating Change, in Baltimore. He used the speech to announce a new federal rule.
The Equal Access to Housing rule, published in the Federal Register the next week, made sure that HUD's core programs are "open to all eligible individuals and families regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or marital status." In a post on the White House blog two days after the speech, Donovan listed what it did:
- housing financed or insured by HUD must be available without regard to actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, or marital status;
- owners and operators of that housing may not ask applicants about their sexual orientation or gender identity, or turn them away because of it;
- "family" in HUD's public housing and voucher programs includes LGBT individuals and couples;
- sexual orientation and gender identity may play no part in lending decisions for FHA-insured mortgages.
He gave the reason too: by one recent report, 40 percent of homeless young people were LGBT.
A conference started for organizers had become a place where the federal government came to make announcements. The training, though, was still the point.
Sources
- H. Res. 1198, 117th Congress (2022), "Recognizing June 2022 as LGBTQI+ Pride Month" (govinfo).
- National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, "4th Annual 'Creating Change' Conference Announced," February 14, 1991 (UNT Digital Library).
- Shaun Donovan, "Ending Housing Discrimination Against LGBT Americans," White House blog, January 30, 2012.
- HUD, "Equal Access to Housing in HUD Programs Regardless of Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity," 77 FR 5662 (February 3, 2012) (Federal Register).
- HUD photographs of the 2012 conference, Records of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, National Archives (e.g. NAID 24098130).
- Wikipedia, "National LGBTQ Task Force" (the 1987 March and the conference's size today).
